The king who needed artists — lots of them

When Charles II returned to London after eight years in exile in 1660, it took him seven hours to cross the city, such were the crowds. He had little time to waste, for there was much to do: he had to create a new government, meet a new parliament, and generally ensure that he didn’t immediately go the way of his father, Charles I. But one of the first things the new king did was visit the home of an artist, Samuel Cooper.

On the face of it this was an odd thing to do, for artists usually visit monarchs, not vice versa. And then there was the elephant in the studio: Oliver Cromwell, the man who had ordered his father’s execution. Cromwell had been Cooper’s greatest patron, and it was Cooper’s likenesses (“warts and all”, as the famous instruction went) that had been used to create Cromwell’s official image during the Commonwealth years.

But Cooper also happened to be the best portrait artist in the land, and Charles needed him. Charles may have been welcomed by cheering crowds, but visually the country was still a republic. Cromwell’s regime had erased all sign of Stuart power. Had Charles looked in the pockets and purses of his new subjects he would have seen the impassive and warty face of Cromwell looking back at him. Cromwell’s legacy was everywhere, and if Charles was to recreate the symbols on which his royal authority would in part depend, he needed artists, and lots of them.

A new exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery in London, Charles II: Art & Power, demonstrates the extent to which Charles shrewdly used art as a means to consolidate his power. You have to look hard to find the result of Charles’s meeting with Cooper, but in a dimly lit ante-room it is there in all its unassuming frankness.

There have been few more important collisions of art and power in British history, for this sensitive yet commanding profile portrait became the basis for Charles’s new coinage. Since the time of Henry VII (whose masterstroke it first was), English coins had borne an accurate likeness of the monarch as the ultimate demonstration of sovereign authority. Cooper’s new likeness was speedily put into circulation.

Not surprisingly, portraiture forms the backbone of this enjoyable show. The first exhibit is the last life portrait of Charles I, painted by Edward Bower shortly before the monarch’s execution. He appears sad and broken — everything his son strained not to be. (Charles II did not own this picture; it was bought in 1951 by the Queen Mother, who had a good sense of humour.)

Thereafter, the portraits become fleshier and less dismal, reflecting Charles II’s own taste.

Nobody perfected the Restoration ideal better than Charles’s official painter, Sir Peter Lely, who produced a stream of “beauties” in various states of undress, something unthinkable in the Puritan gloom of the 1650s. The finest Lely on display here (but hung too high to admire properly) is a three-quarter-length of Anne Hyde, James II’s first wife.

Perhaps because Lely was always painting women the king had slept with, Charles’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, preferred the Flemish artist Jacob Huysmans. His full-length portrait of Catherine as a shepherdess is a tragic reminder of her lonely time in England. She was humiliated by Charles’s endless illegitimate children (14 of them), and despite the many allusions to fertility in Huysmans’ portrait they had no children of their own. The exhibition catalogue gamely suggests that Catherine nonetheless enjoyed her life as queen: “despite this she found some pleasures at court. She was given a pet monkey by Lady Arlington, and during the summer was presented with baskets of fruit.” Verily, a barrel of laughs.

Like his art-mad father, Charles II had a taste for Old Masters. Even before he arrived back in Britain he began proceedings to recover the 1,500 artworks sold from Charles I’s collection in 1650. Many works were returned swiftly by those keen to secure royal appointments, and one exhibit here (a painting by Miereveld) came from Lely, who positively raced to hand back the eight paintings and seven sculptures he had bought at Charles I’s sale. It is in drawings, however, that Charles II escapes from the collecting shadow of his father, and here we see just a handful of the many Holbeins, Leonardos and Michelangelos that he acquired.

When it came to contemporary artists, however, we might wonder about the quality of Charles’ eye. A beast of an exhibit is Antonio Verrio’s “The Sea Triumph of Charles II”, painted in 1674 as a trial to demonstrate Verrio’s abilities to the king. What Verrio lacked in artistic technique he made up for with political nous, and here the priapic Charles is shown surrounded by a cascade of admiring, semi-naked beauties, on one of whom he rests his foot (these days Charles would be #MeToo’d straight back into exile).

The king liked what he saw, and commissioned Verrio to paint 12 rooms and three staircases in Windsor Castle, all of them tumbling with flesh. These were mostly destroyed in the early 1800s by George IV, but someone thought to preserve Verrio’s portrait head of Charles. It shows the king a year before he died, plump and literally shagged out, a world away from Cooper’s authoritative Restoration hero.

The Stuarts are generally deemed Britain’s least successful dynasty. One execution and one permanent exile (James II) out of four is not a good score. But when it came to collecting and patronising the arts they remain un­surpassed. Some historians see a correlation between the failure of a monarch’s rule and their passion for collecting art. Charles I and George IV are exhibit A for the prosecution (and it’s worth noting that the present Queen adds to the Royal Collection very rarely). But this typically excellent exhibition demonstrates that Charles II could be both a successful ruler and a great collector. It bodes well for the next King Charles.

To May 13, royalcollection.org.uk

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